(A condensed version of this story appeared in today’s edition of USA TODAY.)

The police report paints an ugly picture. To read it is to put yourself there, in suburban Minneapolis, at 12:35 a.m. on June 29, 2011, by which point Brett Rogers has already done the things that will cost him his job, his self-respect, and, at least for a little while, his freedom.

You read it and you see Rogers – all 6-foot-4, 260 pounds of him – drunk and slurring his words as he talks to police officers in his driveway. You keep reading, and you see Tiuana, his wife of seven years, dazed and disoriented as she stumbles down the street in the dark, only to be picked up by officers who will later describe the “golfball-sized” bump above her left eye, the blood smeared on her face, the missing tooth. You see the couple’s children, who will later tell a neighbor that they’re scared to go home.

“That was a bad, bad day,” Rogers told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) in a recent phone interview. What he didn’t know back then was how bad, and how much damage he had done. What he still doesn’t know is whether he can come all the way back from it, whether that’s even possible, whether fans and fight promoters will let him.

If you ask him now, Rogers will tell you that it wasn’t any one thing that led to it. It was one thing on top of another, stresses he wasn’t dealing with well, problems he wasn’t talking to anyone about. He and his wife had their issues, like anybody. They had recently moved from East St. Paul to the Apple Valley suburbs, where, according to Rogers, “people notice us.”

What made it tougher was wondering how long he could maintain this new standard of living. His career had started to go downhill. He’d started fighting as a hobby, something to do, then discovered he was pretty good at it. The next thing he knew he was undefeated and knocking out people on TV. His employers put him in a fight against former UFC heavyweight champ Andrei Arlovski – a fight few expected him to win – and Rogers knocked him out as well.

“That’s when I really lost focus on who I was fighting,” Rogers said. “My head was just so heavy, feeling like the world. I thought, it doesn’t matter who I fight. Give me anybody.”

And so they did. Think you can beat anybody? Fine, how about Fedor Emelianenko, the MMA icon who hasn’t lost a fight in nearly a decade, who hasn’t even been out of the first round in three years? Sure, Rogers took that fight. And, right up until he got knocked out in the second round, he even surprised some people with how well he did. Apparently he did well enough for Strikeforce to justify giving him a shot at the heavyweight champion, Alistair Overeem. Why not, Rogers figured. Let’s take our chances.

By the time Strikeforce slotted him into its heavyweight grand prix, he’d lost two of his previous three and was beginning to wonder if he might be out of his depth. He tried to pull it together in training, but it was as if nothing came together the way he wanted it to. By the time he showed up in Dallas to face Josh Barnett, he felt “horrible,” he said, like he was about to embarrass himself on live TV. Which, of course, is exactly what happened when he got submitted 1 minute and 17 seconds into the second round.

“It was a depressing period in my life, and the depression led to me not caring,” Rogers said. “The not caring led to the bottle.”

Rogers still describes himself as “not a big drinker.” Until, that is, he gets going. That’s what happened in the weeks following the Barnett fight, he said.

“I definitely was trying to wash some of those feelings away because that fight, to me, was probably my most embarrassing fight,” Rogers said. “I guess I was trying to recover, you could say, in my own way.”

That ill-advised attempt at recovery resulted in a bad day that led to a worse night. It led to Rogers assaulting his wife in full view of their children, their neighbors, whoever. It led to the police showing up just after midnight, to his wife wandering bloody and dazed down the street, to her pleading with officers not to arrest her husband because, according to the report, she feared it would “cause him trouble with his job.”

It did. The reaction from his employers was swift. As soon as reports surfaced that Rogers had been arrested for third-degree assault on his wife, he was immediately released from his Strikeforce contract. He’d later pleaded guilty and received a 60-day sentence, along with court-mandated counseling sessions after his release. Both helped him, he said, in their own ways.

“I learned that, first and foremost, you have to want to change,” Rogers said. “And I had a lot of time to think about it. I had to sit in the jail and think about what happened, and I made promises to myself.”

In order to pay his bills, Rogers took a job delivering the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which only recently had covered the story of his arrest. He liked the early morning he work, he said, in part because he didn’t have to see too many people face to face. He didn’t have to risk somebody recognizing him, the former heavyweight contender who beat his wife and terrorized his kids. He didn’t have to find out what it would look like as that realization swept across a fight fan’s face, and he was grateful for it.

His MMA career, that chugged along too, mostly to pay the bills. There was talk of signing a deal to fight in Japan, but his manager kept pushing hard for a deal with Bellator. Each time Bellator Chairman and CEO Bjorn Rebney was approached about the idea, his reaction was the same as most other promoters who could afford to pick and choose. Why did he need a guy with so much baggage? Why take that chance?

“Based on some of the things that had happened, we were hesitant,” Rebney said. “A lot of people were.”

Still, Rogers’ manager kept telling Rebney how much Rogers had changed, how deeply sorry he was for what he’d done, and how determined he was to get his life and career back on track. Rebney didn’t doubt that the manager was telling the truth, or at least thought he was, but he’d have to hear it for himself before he could even think about believing it, he said.

“I got on the phone with him and listened to his story, listened to him express regret for what had happened, and it all came off as very legitimate,” Rebney said. “He was working delivering papers, getting up at like 3:30 in the morning. He could have made more working as a bouncer in a club, but he told me he didn’t want to do that because it would put him in the wrong environment. It sounded honest to me.”

So Bellator gave him a fight against Kevin Asplund in June. Rogers won and, according to Rebney, “looked OK,” though not great in the process. When it decided to give him one of the open slots in the heavyweight tournament that begins at Bellator 75 this Friday night in Hammond, Ind., Rogers knew he had to step up his training, which is why he headed to Coconut Creek, Fla., to work with American Top Team. There, he said, he found a heavyweight’s delight. All dedicated fighters, all under one roof, “and when you go back the next day, you see the same faces,” he said. “I never had that before.”

The time away from his family hasn’t been easy, he said, but much like the counseling sessions, he sees it as something he can do to show his wife and kids how serious he is about being the husband and father and provider they need.

“The kids, they understand what I’m doing and how important it is for me to be away,” Rogers said. “My wife, she understands that this is what pays the bills. I think we all learned so much from this. We communicate so much better now because we learned that if something is hurting one of us, it’s hurting us all.”

But if Rogers (12-4 MMA, 1-0 BFC) is serious about climbing the heavyweight ranks again, he has his work cut out for him. Not only does he face a tough first-round opponent in Russian Alexander Volkov (16-3 MMA, 0-0 BFC) on MTV2, he’ll have to battle public perception after so many saw his name in the headlines following what may have been the biggest mistake of his life. Many fight fans may still remember him for that incident more than any of his exploits inside the cage, and he knows it.

“I want that fan to pay more attention to me now than ever,” Rogers said. “I’m human, and most likely that person is human too. I know we make mistakes and we get over things. You have to move forward in life. I’m not going to be stuck in that period for the rest of my life. That’s not me. I want that fan to see and recognize the changes in me.”

Rebney, who might end up crowning Rogers as the new Bellator heavyweight champion by the time the tournament is over, also has every reason to worry about fan reaction to Rogers. But, Rebney said, he’s always been “a believer in second chances,” and he’s hoping that Rogers won’t make him regret it.

“I don’t know where it will go from here,” Rebney said. “I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t know if this will turn out to be a positive story in the end, but based on what he told me, I felt like he was at least deserving of an opportunity. We decided to give it to him.”

What Rogers will do with that opportunity remains to be seen, but he knows he still has a hard road ahead of him, he said. His hope is that maybe his willingness to walk it will help someone else who thinks they’ve fallen far past the point of redemption – a feeling he knows all too well.

“I know that I fell down pretty hard,” Rogers said. “But I want to prove to people that you can bounce back. You can, if your heart is in it and you know your mistakes.”

After Rogers’ mistakes, just winning a couple MMA fights won’t do it. It’s going to take more. How much more, and whether he has it in him, is something he’s still trying to find out.

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